


Inner Demons - Past Lives

by stellarel



Series: Thirteen fanzine prompt week stuff [4]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:54:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24557977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellarel/pseuds/stellarel
Summary: The Doctor's inner demons were mostly just old versions of herself.Everything she ever did wrong, every bad decision she had made, every problem she failed to solve, every person she failed to save.She tries her best to move on. To be better. Because that's the point, right? You fail, you make some mistakes, and you feel bad about it, and then you try again and you do better. You become better. Kinder. You try to do the right thing.Sometimes, though, her past comes back to haunt her.(Thirteen fanzine prompt week thing)
Series: Thirteen fanzine prompt week stuff [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1800295
Comments: 3
Kudos: 45





	Inner Demons - Past Lives

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Thirteenfanzine prompt week! Today's prompt was "Inner demons".

7.

Walking around London, there seems to be a lot of people around, more than usual, anyways. And they're all wearing rainbows in all kinds of different hues, shapes, and sizes. In shirts, and capes, flags and signs and painted on cheeks, and they’re singing, and everybody looks so _happy_ , and for a moment, the Doctor almost thinks she can see Bill in the crowd.

She's not sure which would be worse - if she had just imagined it, or if she hadn't.

Either this was Bill, before the Doctor -

Before the Doctor.

Or, this was just the ghost of Bill, still lingering at the edges of the Doctor’s mind, still reminding her that she would’ve deserved so much more, would’ve deserved to be happy, would’ve deserved a future, and the Doctor took that away from her.

The Doctor blends right in to the rainbow crowd, but she’s pretty sure she’s the only one there with eyes that sad and hearts that heavy.

6.

Ryan is trying to get Graham to watch some sci-fi movie with him. The Doctor is only there to set up the settings on the home theater that may or might not be a little bit psychic - she didn't intend to sit still for approximately 2 hours with nothing to do except look at some moving pictures. She was incredibly old, and did _not_ have the attention spam for that.

"I don't care if you like it, I don't need any creepy space spiders in my life! In case you'll remember, we had some creepy enough Earth spiders here not that long ago, I'd like to not relive that, thanks!" Graham protests, trying to find a movie he'd much rather watch instead.

"Come on, it's funny!"

"The plot _'the moon is full of space spiders_ ' doesn't sound fun to me, son! And that doesn't even make any damn sense!"

The hair on the back of the Doctor's neck stands up, and she tries not to shiver.

Had they both forgotten that time that Clara-

She shakes the thought away.

Of course they had.

They never remembered, the humans.

5.

Graham is walking around in the TARDIS library.

It was impressive in both the size and the selection, and the archiving system was nothing short of absolutely undecipherable, so after about fifteen minutes of trying (and failing) to find what he was looking for, he squints his eyes a little, looking up at the ceiling.

"Hey, um, hello? Spaceship?" He asks, a little tentative.

He knew the Doctor talked to the TARDIS regularly, but he wasn't sure if that would actually work for him, too.

The TARDIS whirs quietly, in a voice that seemed to be considerably louder than the consistent background hum that was always there anyways. and he’s not sure if it’s an answer or not but he marks this down as a win anyways.

"So, I have this buddy, Mark, and his daughter, she's twelve, she has to do a book report for school. And the book they have to read is gone from every single bookshop and library around those parts, so I thought, if I could check if I could borrow it from here? Since, you know, you seem to have about every book that ever existed in here."

The TARDIS hums.

"Problem is, I can't find a bloody thing here. This archive might make sense for a Timelord, but-" He gestures towards himself. "Not me. I don't even know where to start."

The TARDIS helpfully opens up a nearby computer, with a comfortingly simple search bar open on the screen. Not unlike the one in the library Graham usually used.

He types in _Amelia Williams._

A list of book titles emerge on the screen, including the one he was trying to find, and after every single one there's a small green dot and a small box that says _Available_ , but when he tries to press the shelf icon to figure out where they were, it always comes back blank.

He tries this a few more times, just to make sure it wasn't just the technology being weird. No success. Eventually, he sighs, closes the computer, and goes out to try and find the Doctor.

"Thank you anyways, love." He says on his way out, and the TARDIS makes a quiet whirring sound. 

It takes him a while, finding the Doctor, and the corridors seem to stretch and change around him, and at one point he's convinced he's lost and just going in circles, but eventually, he finds her.

"Hey, Doc?"

"Yes, Graham?" She answers, without taking her eyes off the something or the other she was currently in the middle of fixing (or taking apart - Graham wasn’t sure).

"I was trying to find this one book in the library, and I was wondering if you could help me."

"Did you try to the search engine?"

"I did, but it refused to show me the shelf placement."

The Doctor turns to look at him, and furrows her brows a little. "That's strange. She doesn't usually do that."

Graham just shrugs a little, not knowing what to say.

"You weren't trying to find anything forbidden, were you?"

"You've got forbidden books down there?"

"Well, forbidden for you. Future history books and such."

"Oh, no, nothing like that. It's an old book, one of them classic ones they make children read for school. I was wondering if I could borrow it to one of my mates, if that's not a problem."

The Doctor tilts her head a little. "Sure, go ahead. Dunno why she wouldn't show you where it is." She puts down the tools she was holding. "What was the book? I could probably find it for you."

"One of the Amelia Williams ones. _Summer Falls_ I think it was called? Something like that."

The Doctor freezes at the mention of Amy's name, and suddenly her mind is remarkably silent. It’s weird, and it makes her feel like she's been caught under a tidal wave with no forewarning.

She licks her lips.

She's not sure that borrowing it to some child for a book report would be such a good idea - the last page of that book is missing.

4.

Ryan and Yaz are talking about some TV show they both like. The Doctor doesn't pay much attention to this - for one, she has no idea which show they're talking about, and even if she did, she wouldn't have the patience to watch it with them and wait a week for a new episode every time, and anyways, she's in the middle of re-calibrating the temporal stabilizers and that's way more interesting than whatever's going on with the fictional people and their dragons.

The Doctor liked dragons, and she made a mental note to ask if Yaz and Ryan would like to see real ones one day. Or, as real as they got, anyways - there were several alien races that were pretty close.

She’s only half listening to their conversation, it's more background noise than anything, going through one ear and out the other. The temporal stabilizers are very delicate, and keeping them from short-circuiting is taking up at least 40% of her brain power, while a few percents were unhelpfully recounting Vivaldi's Four Seasons 3100 remix on a loop. 

So, she didn't really keep track of what they're talking about, but she's vaguely aware that apparently there's some big season finale coming up, and Ryan has already seen it, while Yaz, apparently, has not.

"Dude, you're not going to believe what-" Ryan starts, and somewhere out of the Doctor's field of vision, there's a swat and a groan and a quiet ' _ow_.'

"SPOILERS!" Yaz yells, and the Doctor flinches a little.

Less because of the volume of her voice, more because of the content of what she said.

The temporal stabilizers short circuit.

3.

Wilfred Mott is a one man army when he puts his mind to something.

In this case, he had been protesting the shutdown of UNIT, by calling the government officials every single day at precisely 8 am right as their phone lines opened, and then keeping them busy for much longer than they would've liked.

They eventually stopped answering his calls, so naturally, he shows up on their doorstep the next morning, with a lawn chair and a termos full of coffee.

And he sits there, talking about how Earth needs UNIT, now more than ever, and don't you have any desire to protect the future generations?

He slowly ropes more people into doing it with him, and soon enough, there's a pretty much ongoing protest on the government's doorstep, mainly consisting of senior citizens who had nowhere else to be, and oh, look, Minnie brought some baked goods and there's a coffee stand now, and over there in that corner they're aggressively knitting scarves for the homeless.

They deviate from their original topic every now and then, using their presence there to protest against whatever needed to be protested against - Nazis, racism, sexism, you know, those kinds of things.

And one day, the Doctor half-accidentally stumbles into this.

She had parked a few blocks away, to stay undercover, and is now just walking by, peering at their signs curiously.

The Doctor thinks she's doing a pretty good job of blending in. Until Wilfred meets her eyes and keeps her gaze locked for just a moment too long and she _knows_ he knows.

"It's you, isn't it?" He says, without bothering with _hello_ or _would you like a Black Lives Matter pin?_

The Doctor doesn't answer. Instead, she shoves her hands in her pockets and rocks back and forth on the balls of her feet. "I'm sorry?" She eventually says, trying to keep up the facade that this was a totally normal conversation with a totally normal stranger who just wanted to support whatever it was that they were supporting now.

"It's you!" Wilfred insists, taking a step closer. "You're different, but it is you!"

The Doctor looks at Wilfred for a moment, and eventually decides that maybe hiding was a lost cause.

"Did you put this all together by yourself, Wilfred?"

"Well, Donna's at work. She would've been here otherwise too, shouting so loud the whole town heard."

The Doctor's lips curl into an involuntary smile, and she relaxes a little.

If Donna wasn't here, then maybe, _maybe_ she could have this piece of history and hang around for a while, stay for a while.

She lets out a breath. "You're right. She would do that." She smiles a little. “The bad guys wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Wilfred smiles, and his eyes look a little less sad. "It _is_ you!" 

And then he wraps the Doctor in a bone-crushing hug. "Where have you been?" He asks, voice thick with emotion.

"Oh, around. Here and there. Helping out."

Wilfred takes a step back, letting the Doctor settle back into standing on her own now.

"What about you?" The Doctor asks. "Fighting the good fight, I see." Then, she pauses to make it seem like this wasn't what she really wanted to ask, and adds: "How's she?"

"She's amazing, Doctor. She's happy."

And really, that's all she needed to hear.

It made the pain of losing her sting a little bit less.

2.

Sometimes Yaz leaves her red leather jacket lying around the console room.

And the console room is different now, and none of the people in the equation are the same anymore, but sometimes when the Doctor sees the leather jacket draped around a chair, just for a split second, she thinks that Martha Jones is back.  
  
And for a moment, she’s happy before she’s sad.

1.

Graham watches the news.

He doesn't necessarily _like_ watching the news - it always brings his mood down, There's so much bad stuff happening all around the world all the time now and it's just a catastrophe after another these days - but he watches the news anyways.

You know, since he'd like to know if anything big, important, or possibly alien was going on.

It's a habit of his - every night, at precisely 7 pm, he tunes in to the local news, whether he was at home or in the TARDIS.

The ship has helpfully added a small TV to one of the shelves on the kitchen, so now he can eat and watch the news at the same time. The eating kind of makes the whole thing a little less terrible.

One night, they all happen to be in the kitchen at the same time - Graham eating a sandwich and watching the news, Yaz drinking a cup of tea that smelled distantly of oranges, and the Doctor fixing the toaster as Ryan tried to convince her they didn't need an extra setting for teleportation.

The newscaster is talking about a strange meteorite, and it cuts out the constant, average, moderate to severe bad news that they usually talked about.

_"Similar to the Chelyabinsk incident, a meteorite was seen exploding over Norway in the lower atmosphere late last night Greenwich time, with a blast radius of-"_

"Hey, Doc, look at this." Graham says, without taking his eyes off the small screen of the TV. They have short, blurry footage someone filmed from their car - it's a strange, shaky blob cutting through the sky and then exploding in an almost silent greenish flash.

The Doctor turns her attention towards the TV, still unscrewing the wires at the bottom of the toaster with one hand.

They replay the footage, as the newscaster calls in some scientist or the other. 

They talk about it for a good minute or so, but don't actually say much - it's all _we don't know for sure yet_ and _we're still investigating_ and _disintegrated upon entry to the atmosphere_.

At the bottom of the screen, in a bland white all caps font, it says DÅRLIG ULV STRANDEN.

Bad Wolf Bay.

The Doctor does her best to pretend this doesn't make the blood in her veins run cold.

She tries to keep her face in check, her expression from showing that she felt like her hearts had stopped.

For a fleeting moment, she dares to hope that maybe there's some impossible rift between this universe and the next one.

She knows it's a terrible thing to hope for, really, but she can't quite bring herself to let that stop her.

The Doctor takes a breath and somewhere in the back of her head registers that she has stopped taking apart the toaster, and her hands were now just idly sitting there, useless. "It's just the changes in pressure breaking apart the rock and metals and ice. They all expand differently when the temperature changes, and hence-" She makes a vague hand gesture towards the screen. "-explosion. Nothing to worry about. Completely natural."

They all turn back towards the screen, having more or less believed her explanation. The Doctor swallows and goes back to attacking the toaster, and the newscaster moves on to the next bad thing that had happened today.

As soon as her human companions are asleep, she puts the engines on silent and heads to Norway. Just to be sure.

It really is just a meteorite, and the Doctor's hearts sink a little.

It's not that she really let herself believe that there was a chance, still, but she still finds herself feeling disappointed. It had been just a whisper, just a ghost of a small sliver of hope she didn't know she had still been holding onto, and now it was gone.

It was just a meteorite.


End file.
